Inside HP Labs: 8 cool projects

Photonics: Photonics is the use of light to transport data. It is used today in data centers to connect one building to another, via fiber optics, and is emerging as a technology that can connect one server rack to another.

In the future, photonics could be used to connect not only the server blades in a rack, but the interconnects inside the computer or even the connections inside a CPU. Photonics is an important advancement because, as supercomputer design moves from petascale computing to exascale speeds, a new kind of interconnect will be required to move those massive amounts of data. HP is the first company to develop a working photonics prototype, and has developed working models in the lab for how optics will be used inside the server rack.

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